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Cornell: Surely You're Joking

July 3, 2025


I've been putting up fat JD Vances up everywhere at our Cornell Hardware Accelerator. Everyone seems to follow the rules too well and I want to cause instability (as usual). It's too perfect.

First I began tame, printing a flyer advertising "5-10K STARTUP GRANTS FOR CORNELL FOUNDERS" with the QR code going to a photo of JD. It said that the deadline was on "JULY 1, 2025" to incentivize people to not ignore it. To make it abundantly obvious that it was us, the photo is hosted on Verdus's subdomain.

vance

Still, we got this message in the Slack #general channel a day later: "@channel Someone has been leaving random print outs taped around the shop at Rev. If you happen to see someone doing this, please let me know - it is not appropriate to be taping things to pillars or doors. Please be respectful of the space we are all working in!"

I was pissed off—pissed that they didn't give us credit. So I had to go round two. This time, Om and I printed out tons of mini JD Vances and Hans Landas saying "You're sheltering JD Vance edited images, are you not?" I meticulously cut them out with an X-ACTO knife, 3D printed a Rococo frame, painted it brown, X-ACTO'd annoying double-sided tape into perfect segments, and stuck it on a random wall as if it was the Louvre. It was much better than duct taping a banana to a wall. (Imagine) I also showed every mentor what I made and handed out the extra Vance's to random people. AND I changed the background of the Raspberry Pi desktop background to JD Vance, morphing him into Dan Crenshaw, in view of everyone.

Yet, with all that evidence, we still got no credit. I came to the space today and our beautiful piece of art was robbed but the #general chat was empty. It feels like they want us to go bigger, more beautiful—no swamp all signal. We might need to up our game if they insist.


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